The Future of Media

We have already said goodbye to the Rocky Mountain News, which after one hundred and fifty years of serving Colorado, printed its last paper in early February. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ceased it’s print edition after one hundred and forty six years, and now only serves online readers with a new and improved website called the SeattlePI.com. Many more newspapers are either considering closing shop, or following in the footsteps of the Seattle Post.

 It’s a pressing time for journalists and publishers. I think everyone in the media business was aware that newspapers could no longer be the only source of income for the publications. The Internet is a fast growing source of information and with the improvements in technology everyone is moving online for up-to-date news. Yet, newspapers have always been around, they have played a vital role in the lives of readers and have served as companions at the breakfast table, coffee shops and on the commute to and from work or class. But we have to face the hard cold facts now; maybe everyone in the business was in denial of this decline. The recession however set the deadline and determined the lifespan for newspapers.

 

So what’s next?

 

In it’s March/April edition, the Columbia Journalism Review asked eight reporters from different organizations to write an article on where the news industry will be in the next five years. Two of those articles, “Unchaining the Monitor” by the editor of The Christian Science Monitor, and the other called “ Two Tents” by the editor in chief of Politico stood out. The situations they presented seem plausible, even though they were solely based on mere speculation.

 

Firstly, I think the industry has accepted the fact that major retrenchment will take place in order to sustain a news organization. But this downsizing also has its advantage. It acts like a filter, leaving us with the best in the field. That means better reporting, more efficiency and a multi-skilled work force. This was an underlying sentiment held by all the articles I have read, not just within this publication, but others. Furthermore, experts in the industry share the same sentiment.

 

According to the German publisher Axel Springer’s chief executive Mathias Döpfner, “The number of players will diminish, but the strong players may be stabler after the crisis.”

 

Coming back to the articles at hand, “Unchaining the Monitor,” to me seemed the most plausible situation in the next five years. The article accepts the fact that a lot of newspapers will shut down. However, it turns its focus to the survivors. Their future is bright, they have “ transformed themselves into true multimedia operations with a core editorial group publishing, via newsprint, mobile, the Web and … foldable electronic readers.”

 

There is an understanding within the news industry that print is dying and the future is in multimedia. Convergence is key. David Ng, executive editor of the New York Daily, said, “While I think it’s important for the news room to integrate, it’s doubly important for the business side to converge as well.”

 

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is probably one of the best examples of this transition. Another prediction the article made was the move from a five-day a week print publication to a weekly one.

 

Raju Narisetti, managing editor of The Washington Post, shares a similar view. According to him, “eventually you might see most papers with smaller circulations that pay a lot more than 50 cents each day for the serendipity and habit of reading a physical paper.”

 

The transition from print to online is a very realistic scenario, and the article highlights that by saying The Monitor wanted “to retain longtime print subscribers and thought [they] might find some modest growth in a reduced-frequency, twelve-by-ten inch magazine/newspaper hybrid.”

 

The business model described also seems plausible. According to the article, “ traffic analysis told [them] that aggregators and people using search engines liked [their] individual articles but that, like most news operations, [they] had a hard time converting the one time visitor into a return visitor who returned.”

 

In a global context, a leading Indian newspaper publication, The Indian Express is also struggling with the same idea. How to retain readers online is a pressing issue. The business model presented in “Unchaining the Monitor” also addressed this issue saying their goal was “to quintuple page views- then five million a month- in five years.”

 

The article continued to talk about a shift in approach to journalism. The Web being more interactive, would mean ‘conversation, citizen journalism, and other forms of reader/user involvement.” Journalism is definitely going to become more interactive with the move to the Web. Blogs and individual websites have proved this.

 

According to Rick Edmonds, Poynter media business analyst, in a phone interview, “ Print will move to being more analytical and opinion based articles. The news is already available online for free, so now we need to give readers something else.”

 

That is another issue. The news is available online for free and anyone can have access to it. One of the biggest problems online newspapers are facing today is their news stories are being picked up by major search engines like Google and Yahoo. With regards to this issue, in an article in the New York Times, Ken Doctor, an analyst at Outsell, a media research firm, said, “The A.P. is trying to assert its value to the member newspapers,” by shifting the industry discussion “from fair use to fair share.”

The A.P. and other wire services have licensing agreements with Google, Yahoo and others, for some of their content to appear on those sites’ news pages, while newspapers generally do not. But general Web searches on those sites often turn up wire service material that is not covered by the agreements.

 

Matthew Jackson, a telecommunications professor at the Pennsylvania State University is skeptical about how news organizations are going to tackle this problem.

“There are copyright laws, and although Google are trying to find a solution with news providers, they still haven’t found a way to determine how the shared profits will be determined.”

 

The second article that I felt was plausible was the “Two Tents” article. It described content and also different methods of providing news rather than the traditional method of news articles and stories.

 

The venue of the article was Politico and according to the writers predictions, they “proved that niche publications, producing highly focused journalism for an audience with intense interest in particular subjects, can achieve the same ends- both editorially and financially- that in the past were the sole province of a handful of big newspapers and broadcast networks.”

 

I feel like that is a likely situation given that news is moving towards being packaged as per the consumers’ requirements. It is becoming a product that in itself needs to be marketed and have all the elements of the product mix in order to sell.

 

Narisetti furthers this idea of niche publications as he talked about whether consumers would pay for content online. According to him, “consumers will pay for certain content. The key is to give what is not competitive or what is commodity for free and charge for what is more valuable or unique even as we make the payment experience seamless.”

 

Shifting from America to the international paradigm, Europe seems to be having better luck with getting consumers to pay for content. An article in the New York Times discussed how Europe is trying to generate revenues for online content.

VG Nett, a Web site loosely affiliated with Verdens Gang, a tabloid newspaper has been doing extremely well. It has a profit margin of more than 30 percent and rivals Google as the most popular Web site in Norway.

VG Nett, like most newspaper Web sites, generates most of its revenue from advertising, but is starting to raise money from users. VG Nett recently started charging up to 780 crowns a year for live streams of soccer matches. And a social network connected with VG Nett charges users to upgrade their profiles. Access to news, however, remains free.

 

Both Jackson and Edmonds drew the comparison between the news industry and the music industry in light of making a profit. Few Europeans are unwilling to pay for music directly, through services like iTunes, so the industry is instead bundling music costs into a broadband subscription, like basic cable channels do in the United States.

The Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism, however is skeptical of applying micro payments to newspapers, and has suggested providing access to newspaper Web sites for a fee paid at the Internet service provider level. For such models to succeed, newspapers would have to work together.

 

As for the methods of delivering news, I feel like most news organizations will move in the same direction. Consumers are bored of the old way news is delivered, more so the younger generation who are what will sustain the news industry in the future. The youth today are more technologically savvy and access news online. However, moving beyond the Web 2.0, other delivery mechanisms are also available, all mind you, that are based on the Internet. Blackberrys, iPhones and even other cellular devices provide access to the news with a click of a button. All news organizations need to do is make an agreement with the network provider and have them add on a fee to the data package. That fee can go to news organizations providing the news to start with.

 

According to Politico’s predictions, video dispatches from journalists on the road will become wildly popular. They will have daily Web TV program, even though a “little cheesy, perhaps, but damned if it does not routinely get two hundred thousand viewers a day.”

 

The bottom line however, is the news industry is changing. Viveck Goenka, chairman of the Indian Express Newspaper Group is concerned about the possibility of a decline in investigative journalism. “ If news organizations around the world don’t come up with a sustainable business model we might have to cut costs in terms of the kind of content as well,” he said. This is worrying as one of the main roles the media plays in society other than being a news provider, is that of a watchdog.

 

I am hopeful however, that the news industry will collectively come to adopt a business model that will not only retain the key elements of journalism but will also be able to profit from them. The news industry has taken a beating from the Internet. Classifieds have been lost to Craig’s List and other websites and Google and Yahoo have been leeching off news providers.

 

However, having gotten over the biggest hurdle, the acceptance of the fact that print will no longer sustain the media is a big positive for the news industry. As of now one can only speculate, through trial and error I feel a business model will emerge from which the news industry will benefit. Will newspapers be around for another ten to fifteen years? I would like to believe they would. We may be a fast moving society, but I think it may take some time before we cut out a tangible source of news from our lives.